Bitcoin Forum

I saw recently that a transaction was done where the transaction fees were 83.65 BTC to move 139.42btc.

With transaction fees like this, and traffic inevitably going up over the years, will Bitcoin become unaffordable to use?

That transaction fee was either payed base on mistake by the sender or rather just a way to spread FUD just like how you have fallen into it now. If read through the forum many have made mistakes of such in the past where some got the excess payment back by the mining pool. Although one can’t predict the future but bitcoin transaction can never even amount to a 0.1 bitcoin been payed as a fee.

The high transaction issue is just because of the congestion of the mempool due to ordinals and inscriptions, something that I bet you the hype will die down soon. Should it last long it will be to the bull run after then just like all shit coins do it will rug pull

This is a mistake by the person that make the transaction, not the mempool congestion. Mempool can not be that congested for people to pay such fee. Paying one address from one input takes just less than $6 right now at fee rate of 104 sat/vbyte.

Thank you for the response.
But even a $5 fee to make a simple transaction seems high. Even if it was only $1 it would be high.
If Bitcoin is meant to be an alternative to fiat, wouldn't the fees need to be only a few tenths of a cent to make it an everyday currency to use?

Do you seriously believe Transaction Fees are so high you have to pay almost 3 MILLION DOLLARS to move some Bitcoin?

It may become more expensive unless you make the move to Lightning Network.  Mostly during congestion however.  But it will never be THAT high.  That was either some kind of error or a criminal scheme.

It is becoming increasingly clear that it will not be used in the future for small day-to-day payments, such as paying for coffees, for two reasons: fees and Gresham's law. It is very convenient for sending large and even medium amounts but not for small payments, and LN, which is a proposed solution, is only partially so because it is necessary to open channels in the blockchain and it is not clear that it could support all global payments either, given that there are many other alternatives for this.

The amount transacted is irrelevant to the fee. Usually, the fee is about $ 0.1 to $3.


Bitcoin is not meant to be an alternative to fiat.

Bitcoin is meant to be a decentralized world currency, without borders. You can send your money to whoever you want, without asking for permission. With a good degree of privacy. And fast (10 minutes is very fast)

If you don't care about decentralization and only about fees, just use Visa. Bitcoin wasn't made so you can buy a coffee (although you can already do that )

About $1 being too high... I can say you just don't need bitcoin. When you need it, you will find it very cheap. For example, a SWIFT can cost you more than than 20 USD and take nearly a week to get your money.

We are not certain about the transaction if the mistake was coming from the sender or not, but you can believe that bitcoin transaction fee cannot be that costly, with this high transaction fee, we still have some way out of being highly affected through the inflated transaction fees, use the mempool to know the current fee of making transactions, use the lower priority if you don't need it confirmed fast as possible, use viabtc to accelerate your transaction, use RBF to pump it in case of more delay which you couldn't afford any longer, lastly, this will not be like this forever before the lasting solution is gotten.

Honestly, believing in such transaction fees is absolutely insane. Transacting the whole of Bitcoin in circulation can not even amount to that transaction fees. Something fishy is behind that transaction if it wasn't an error from the sender. What a waste of coins!

Recently, there's actually a hike in transaction fees due to congestion and the ordinals hype but that's a temporary situation that'll last for little moment. There's nothing to be panic about here as things will be back to normalcy soon. If fees are this high, then bitcoin will be more worse than government and their banks in criminality.

When I heard this news that was so hurting because the users who are working just on the bitcoin and if they are just using bitcoin transactions to send money to their bank and anywhere they if they want to send it to their relatives then how would they manage this fee, and I didn't understand what is the increase in the fee of the bitcoin even its prices didn't move that way. But still I can see that bitcoin fee are rapidly increasing which is not good at all for the users.

I think the fee will be reduced in some days and even if the price of the bitcoin moves up then it would  be another scene.

lol There is no way that someone spent 84 bitcoins to send 139.  Yes, bitcoin transaction prices are crazy high right now, but you do have the opportunity to set fees yourself, and so if someone really did do this, they have no one to blame but their dumb selves.

Bitcoin transaction times will eventually speed back up and become less costly, this is how it's always been.  That said I am hopeful that I solution to fix this from happening again will come about.  Using bitcoin as a currency is vital for it's adoption in my opinion.

Yes, initially it is fine for small transactions, however bitcoin is not always a suitable alternative when it comes to amount of transaction. Actually you have 2 sending solutions here, using LN or a centralized wallet.
Bitcoin has been dollar indifferent since its inception, the famous term is "1BTC=1BTC". $5 satoshi today was only worth a few cents 7 years ago.

No, there is not only no reason for anyone to waste hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of BTC in transaction fees, but these fees not economically sustainable in the long term. The simple reason is that almost nobody has 100BTC to use for a transaction fee, given that the supply is limited to 21 million BTC.

Simply put, there are just not enough bitcoins to fill up every transaction in the block with that kind of fee.

Impossible because:
1) If fees grow and people stop paying for transactions then there is more space in the blocks and the fees go down becoming affordable again.
2) If people pay that much to have their transactions confirmed fast it means they afford to do so, which gain brings us back to square 1.

Think of it like diamonds or sportscars, they are barely affordable because some people are willing to spend money on them, if they wouldn't you wouldn't have expensive jewelry and cars in the first place.

I will like to use an instance of when the mempool was congested few days ago and users have to increase their transaction fees to get attended to by miners, which made some of the transactions delayed for a whole day while others were more than that, because of these congestions, users have been faced with increasing the transaction fees which have been increasing gradually. Although it is still very much at the affordable rates as you mentioned, but over time, as the population and the usability increases, do you think the transaction fees could ever rise to the level of paying that much? I think that's the question the questioner asked, just to put it in a proper perspective.

Also, I am aware that this act could be centered towards causing FUD in the market, and not just a mistake. Even though as human beings, we are inevitable from mistakes,  we are most times very careful when it comes to finances especially as it states that it is nonrefundable. Don't you also think it in this perspective?

No one in the right sense of mind would pay that much transaction fee and first of all there is no way that such a higher fee will even reflect as transaction fee.

But it's little disappointing to see the transaction fee getting higher due to congestion and this usually happens during bullrun and this itself kills essence on Bitcoin, what's the point of using it as P2P transfer medium if you are going to pay huge transaction fee. It's more like the rentals of hotels during vacation and festive season.

You can ignore the above news. It was a mistake so no point in discussing.

it is true that in the last few weeks bitcoin fees have increased due to the network being congested, but this has not caused bitcoin fees to rise so high that it makes it difficult for people to make transactions.

we just need to wait for the network to free up some space and surely the fees from bitcoin will become more normal. because this congested problem was caused by ordinal and if the hype goes down maybe the network will return to normal and users can make transactions freely again.

If you dont know on how fees works on Bitcoin transaction then you would be basically be saying up these things, but if you are aware that mistakes could
really happen specially on setting out that sat/byte thing then you wont really be ending up on questioning out.
Unable to use? Why?

https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-user-unwittingly-pays-3-1-million-in-single-transaction-fee/

They would really be that giving it back on the said address or user. Mistakes like this could really happen since not all
would really be knowledgeable on how Bitcoin wallet or fee works. lol.

There's no sense on talking or trying out to getting in line or connection about being unfavorable to use.
Fees arent a problem but usually this stuff do happen when there's network connection and basing up on experience
the highest so far that i have seen is almost $20.

When I knew about bitcoin earlier, one major thing that was used to sail bitcoin is cheap transaction fee and we also know that $5 can never be cheap in any condition. Unless someone who wants to buy Ferrari car, he can easily pay $5 fee.

When did this change? I mean Satoshi stated it in the bitcoin whitepaper.

Also, with cheaper rate, we shouldn't try to eliminate the idea of cheap transaction because the fees are going up now.

Bitcoin was said to be used to buy coffee and it failed, that is why the idea of LN came in place to help scale bitcoin.

The transaction fee depends upon the load over the network. If the load is less, fee will be less but I have never seen that much fee till now . You can send BTC for as low as 60 sats/B according to the current(can be checked always) demand of the network. I am pretty sure that there must be some technical issue from sender side.

Big challenge is that some people do not exactly know how to make transactions with bitcoins and since they lack tutelage, they make mistakes.

They have no idea about how to check for the transaction fee on the mempool, and these ignorance usually makes them make expensive mistakes.

The fee was just a few cents a couple of weeks back and the issue came back due to the spam transactions of brc20 tokens congesting the network but as in previous instances, the situation will resolve in a short time frame.

You can already send Bitcoin via the lightning network with a small fee compare to on-chain transactions.

It is worth mentioning that there is a purging or no priority fee rate, and even if you don't want to pay too much in fees for your tx to be confirmed fast, you also should not pay fees that are too low, and that would keep your tx's stuck for a very long time until it is purged out of the mempool of most nodes.
BTC tx fees is not even determined by the amount in BTC that you are sending to begin with.
I think you are are missing the point here, the person who paid that excess fee probably made a mistake and it is not the fault of the network. Take note that the price of BTC doesn't also affect tx fees.
Not only that, other than network congestion, tx fees are determined by your inputs and outputs and also the address type used in the tx.

Bitcoin is an alternative to fiat currency because of it futures which include decentralization, transparency through blockchain transactions and store of value.
If you hold fiat for long, it will lose value due to inflation and economic situation of your country. Moreover, Bitcoin is a store of value and it is a currency that gives us financial freedom and set us free from third parties like banks and others.

The transaction fee is dependable of the network congestion which is recently affected by ordinals, and other BRC network projects, but normally, when it is in normal state, the fee is not suppose to be high because you can use less than $1 to run your transaction which is cheap.

bitcoin is already cheap to transfer but because of congestion and ordinals the fee became very high for somedays now, eventually it will be back to normal.

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two incidents of paying insanely high fees it's seems like this one is FUD, who knows maybe the user is so unlucky.
we came this far in the conversation but no one shared the transaction and addresses.
so here it is:
transaction: https://mempool.space/tx/b5a2af5845a8d3796308ff9840e567b14cf6bb158ff26c999e6f9a1f5448f9aa
address: https://mempool.space/address/bc1qn3d7vyks0k3fx38xkxazpep8830ttmydwekrnl

I kinda doubt that somebody moving that much bitcoin would be clueless about sending transactions.  Sure, some peeps may not realize you can view pending fees on the mempool.  But come on - this ain't their first rodeo.  My guess is the high fee was on purpose.  Maybe they wanted to hide the source of the coins or something shady like that and  or maybe some botched automated transfer? Heck if I know for sure.  But no way was it just a slip up from ignorance.

It is high in amount to some people, but not high in amount to some people. There will be a time the mempool will become less congested and lower fee is going to be used again for making transaction. But if you do not want to be making use of high fee, you can use lightning network. You can have small amount of money on lightning network account. If you are not technical enough to use lightning network on noncustodial wallet or having your own channel, you can use the custodial lightning network which is easy and you can just use it with small amount of money.

I don't see the reason why Bitcoin should be unaffordable. Because the sender set the fees by mistake, it doesn't mean Bitcoin transactions are expensive, and for that reason, Bitcoin will be unaffordable. For individual mistakes, we can't blame Bitcoin anyway. We should learn about Bitcoin technical issues and know how to use a custodial wallet. Since the transaction fees were unrealistic, the sender used a non-custodial wallet to make the transaction, where the sender is fully responsible for his funds. We are hopeless when a person doesn't have basic knowledge using a non-custodial wallet.

I would say that such a transaction might have taken place out of error. On a normal basis, the value of such a fee of $3 million is enough to do other meaningful things in the current state of the world economy. Maybe, just like other members have said, this could be a syndicate trying to launder money, and these are what paint bitcoin a bad image in the eyes of the government.

Nevertheless, OP, there is another thread that has this topic already in existence before yours. So I would suggest you lock this thread.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5475177.msg63206835#msg63206835

I see what you mean about those transaction fees - they really can be annoying! But let me play devil's advocate for a sec.  Keeping Bitcoin's whole system secure and running actually takes a lot of power and work behind the scenes.  So even if a 5 buck fee feels high just to send some Bitcoin to your buddy or something, there is more to it than meets the eye. Bitcoin still stands as the most secure decentralized digital currency out there, but that heightened security comes with higher costs.  There are ways to cut transaction fees, sure, but using Bitcoin's main blockchain to buy a cup of coffee isnt the most practical route.

The maker of this transaction must be meeting some kind of deadline or some similar case because he doesn't want his transaction to be stuck. But paying 83.65 BTC is not something that can be digested easily; this whole thing makes no sense. Even while writing 83.65, I was going to ignore the last decimal number of 0.65, but then I came to think that it is BTC, and 0.65 in itself is a lot of money.

Many similar topics have already been made on it. I recently replied to one totally similar to it, but the purpose of that topic was not to raise concerns like you raised here.

I will say that if things keep going like this, then we might not be able to afford BTC while making transactions. Even withdrawing funds from centralized exchanges used to be cheaper than withdrawing from SPV wallets, but now it costs around $17 to $28. I am seeing the transaction fee for the past 2 days, but it only moves in cents. On KuCoin, the fee is even higher; it was around $25 the last time I checked. This really forces me to convert my BTC into another coin before making a transaction.

Indeed, if you think about it, it is very difficult if you have to pay that much fee to send Bitcoin. And whether that's true or not, there may be errors when sending. Either in terms of network selection or speed. But what is certain is that, as Bitcoin users, we should be able to pay attention to things like this. If the fee is too large, then don't send it straight away. Try to observe and analyze what is happening. Why is the fee so large, and various other possibilities. So we need to double or triple check the correctness of the transaction fee. No need to rush to make delivery. And there is also a lightening network that helps users reduce transaction fees. I also often postponed my appointment several times because the fee felt quite large, in the end I found the right time for it.

While we are all bound to make mistakes as no one is born an expert on any topic, at the same time this goes way beyond what it can be tolerated and thought of as a mistake, with so much money on the line people really need to inform themselves about what they are doing, as we have seen mistakes on the past in which a person confused the fee and the amount to be sent and they were reversed, but in this case something different must have happened as it is impossible that anyone with even the most insignificant amount of knowledge about bitcoin could make that kind of mistake since both amounts were very high.

This is due to some crap tokens like Ordinals, BRC20 and similar... they are spamming the network with hundreds of thousands of useless transactions. So I won't be surprised if we'll indeed reach the fee amounts you mentioned and render Bitcoin unusable. That's why it's important to stop this token spam/ddos.

These increases in fees happen from time to time on the network. soon the blockchain plus fees will comeback to normal,never takes long.